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The Town Hill Cemetery is the final resting place of New Hartford's pioneers, as well as numerous writers, actors, artists, philanthropists and leaders in business.
This page is a labor of love, dedicated to them; check back often to find new portraits published.
Notable Residents page last updated March 30 2026.
Mary Louise Curtis Bok Zimbalist
1876 – 1970
Philanthropist
Mary Louise Curtis Bok Zimbalist was the founder of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. She was the only child of the magazine and newspaper magnate Cyrus H. K. Curtis and Louisa Knapp Curtis, the founder and editor of the Ladies' Home Journal.
Aged 13, writing under her mother's maiden name (as Mary L. Knapp), she was one of sixteen people on the staff of Ladies' Home Journal in 1890, the first year of Edward W. Bok's long tenure as editor of the magazine. In 1896, at the age of nineteen, she married Bok, who was fourteen years her senior. The couple had two sons, William Curtis Bok and Cary William Bok.
Her husband retired from the magazine in 1919, and they spent their winters in Florida, where they built the Bok Tower Gardens near Lake Wales. The marriage of Mary Louise and Edward Bok lasted 34 years until his death in 1930.
View archival footage of President Calvin Coolidge dedicating Bok Tower 1929
She became involved with the Settlement Music School at the age of 48. At the time, the school was focused on providing musical training to young immigrants. In 1917, she made a gift to the school of $150,000 for a Settlement Music House. The music house's goal was "Americanization among the foreign population of Philadelphia." A close friend of the Bok family, pianist Josef Hofmann, played a recital at the school's dedication. Today, this facility on Queen Street in Philadelphia is known as the Mary Louise Curtis Branch.
In 1924, she established the Curtis Institute of Music, which she named in honor of her father, who also had a great interest in music. After consulting with musician friends, including Josef Hofmann and Leopold Stokowski, on how best to help musically gifted young people, Mrs. Bok purchased three mansions on Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square and had them joined and renovated. She established a faculty of prominent performing artists and made several gifts to the institute, eventually leaving it with an endowment of $12 million (representing approximately $220 million in modern purchasing power).
She was the chief beneficiary of her father's estate, inheriting assets estimated at $18 to 20 million when he died in 1933 (converting to as much as $490 million in 2026). At this time, she became the largest shareholder, director and a vice president of Curtis Publishing. She then founded the Curtis Hall Arboretum at the family residence in Wyncote, Pennsylvania.
Widowed since Edward Bok's death in 1930, she married Efrem Zimbalist, the Russian-born violinist and director of the Curtis Institute of Music, on July 7, 1943, at Lyndonwood, her family's summer estate. Zimbalist, who had joined the institute's faculty as a violin instructor in 1928 and assumed directorship in 1941, shared Curtis Bok's deep commitment to musical education, facilitating their professional and personal alignment prior to the union. The marriage, Zimbalist's second following the 1938 death of his first wife, the soprano Alma Gluck, produced no children and endured until Curtis Bok Zimbalist's death in 1970, spanning 27 years marked by continued patronage of the arts.
Curtis Institute of Music, Wikipedia, The New York Times
Publishing October 2026, on the 150th anniversary of Mary Curtis’s birth, this fascinating story, particularly relevant during America’s 250th birthday celebration, will appeal to anyone who loves American history, and especially to musicians, opera lovers, and aficionados of chamber and symphony orchestra music. Full description and specifications
Clara Louise Kellogg
1842 – 1916
American operatic dramatic soprano
Clara Louise Kellogg was an American operatic dramatic soprano with a range of two and one-half octaves. Her voice in youth was a high soprano with a range from C to E flat. With age it lost some of the highest notes but gained in power and richness.
Clara Louise Kellogg was born in Sumterville, South Carolina, the daughter of Jane Elizabeth (Crosby) and George Kellogg. She received her musical training in the Academy of Music, New York City, and first sang opera there in 1861. Her fine soprano voice and artistic gifts soon made her famous. She appeared as prima donna in Italian opera in London and at concerts in 1867 and 1868, and from that time till 1887 was one of the leading public singers. She appeared at intervals in London, but was principally engaged in America.
In 1874 Kellogg organized an opera company widely known in the United States, and her enterprise and energy in directing it were remarkable.
Kellogg retired after marrying Carl Strakosch in Elkhart, Indiana, on November 6, 1886. In 1913 she published her memoirs under the title Memoirs of an American Prima Donna. She died at her home in New Hartford, Connecticut on May 13, 1916.
Wikipedia
Excerpt from Kellogg's 1913 Memoirs of an American Prima Donna:
Miss Kellogg married Carl Strakosch, who had for some time been her manager. Mr. Strakosch is the nephew of the two well-known impresarios, Maurice and Max Strakosch. After her marriage, the public career of Clara Louise Kellogg virtually ended. The Strakosch home is in New Hartford, Connecticut, and Mrs. Strakosch gave to it the name of "Elpstone" because of a large rock shaped like an elephant that is the most conspicuous feature as one enters the grounds through the poplar-guarded gate. Mr. and Mrs. Strakosch are very fond of their New Hartford home, but, the Litchfield County climate in winter being severe, they usually spend their winters in Rome. They have also travelled largely in Oriental countries.
In 1912, Mr. and Mrs. Strakosch celebrated their Silver Wedding at Elpstone. On this occasion, the whole village of New Hartford was given up to festivities, and friends came from miles away to offer their congratulations. Perhaps the most pleasant incident of the celebration was the presentation of a silver loving cup to Mr. and Mrs. Strakosch by the people of New Hartford in token of the affectionate esteem in which they are both held.
The woman, Clara Louise Kellogg, is quite as distinct a personality as was the prima donna. So thoroughly, indeed, so fundamentally, is she a musician that her knowledge of life itself is as much a matter of harmony as is her music. She lives her melody; applying the basic principle that Carlyle has expressed so admirably when he says: "See deeply enough and you see musically."
Nelia Gardner White
1894 – 1957
Writer, Artist
Nelia Gardner White, one of five children of a Methodist minister, lived in several small towns as she was growing up. Though the family had very little money, the atmosphere of the home was happy; life was filled with "books, friends, and fun." By taking many different sorts of jobs, White was able to attend Syracuse University for two years (1911-13) and the Emma Willard Kindergarten School (1913-15). After several years as a kindergarten teacher, she married a lawyer. The couple had two children.
During World War II, as a guest of the British Ministry of Information, White wrote articles about England. In 1948 she won the $8,000 prize in the Westminster Press Fiction Contest with her novel No Trumpet Before Him. White gives great credit for her start as a writer to Maude Stewart, a teacher in the kindergarten school who helped her toward an understanding of human character and of the various relationships between people. White contributed articles about child care to a kindergarten magazine. She began writing fiction with stories for kindergarten children and four novels for young people and then branched out to adult fiction. The rest of her life is a record of much industry and a great deal of success. Hundreds of her stories appeared in such popular magazines as the American, Ladies' Home Journal, People's Home Journal, Midland, McCall's, Pictorial Review, Forum, and Good Housekeeping. In addition, she wrote 25 novels.
Her fiction is notable for a clear and compassionate delineation of human characters and a smooth, almost poetic style. In her early writing, she frequently exhibits a facile sentimentality; later she was able to control this, so it could enhance rather than mar her narrative. Though all her life she used rural and smalltown settings and characters, near the very end she portrayed a few more sophisticated men and women against a city background. While certainly not "high brow," her fiction is not to be classed as "slick" or "light." According to one critic, her last novel, The Gift and the Giver, published the year of her death (1957), is "perhaps her most penetrating and at times disturbing book." Another critic wrote, "None of Mrs. White's prize winning novels has the brutal realism and the compassionate power of truth that The Gift and the Giver evokes."
Thus White's art grew and developed throughout the years, always illustrating her personal theory about writing. One must have discipline, she said, and "discipline comes through failure, through writing thousands of words and using only a hundred of them, through filling the mind with great literature, through stretching the imagination to the utmost, through forgetting markets and concentrating on the immediate work. A surface cleverness is not enough."
White is the mother of Barbara W. Yedlin, who founded New Hartford's Bakerville Library in 1949.
Encyclopedia.com
Alma Gluck Zimbalist
1884 – 1938
Romanian-born American lyric soprano
Gluck was born as Reba Feinsohn in Iași, Romania, the daughter of Zara and Leon Feinsohn. Gluck moved to the United States at a young age in 1889. Although her initial success came at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, Gluck later performed widely in America and became an early recording artist. Although various sources claim that her recording of "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" for the Victor Talking Machine Co. was the first celebrity recording by a classical musician to sell one million copies, Victor ledgers do not support the claim—nor did Gluck ever make such a claim herself. It was awarded a gold disc, only the seventh to be granted at that time. Gluck was a founder of the American Woman's Association.
Her daughter Marcia Davenport was the child of her first marriage (to Bernard Glick, an insurance man). Gluck later married violinist Efrem Zimbalist and had two children, the actor Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. (1918–2014) and Maria Virginia Zimbalist (1915–1981). Gluck evidently adopted her professional surname as a variation of her first husband's surname ("Glick").
Gluck retired to New Hartford, Connecticut, to raise her family in 1925. Along with her husband Efrem, she regularly attended the Episcopal Church in New Hartford. Efrem Jr. and Maria were both christened there, and the couple placed Efrem in an Episcopal boarding school in New Hampshire. Efrem Jr. later became active in evangelical circles and was one of the founders of Trinity Broadcasting Network. Gluck recorded several Christian hymns in duet with Louise Homer, among them "Rock of Ages", "Whispering Hope", "One Sweetly Solemn Thought", and "Jesus, Lover of My Soul".
After a long illness, she was taken to the Rockefeller Institute Hospital in Manhattan, New York City, but died from liver failure several days later, on October 27, 1938, at the age of 54.
Gluck is the grandmother to actress Stephanie Zimbalist, the daughter of her son the actor Efrem Zimbalist Jr.
Wikipedia
Listen to Gluck's recordings, courtesy Library of Congress:
Berceuse | 1913
Che volo d'angelli | 1911
Come, Beloved | 1916
La Boheme-Musetta Waltz | 1916
Bernice L. Kenyon Gilkyson
1897 – 1982
Poet, Author, Editor
Bernice Kenyon Gilkyson, considered in the 20s and 30s to be one of the most important young poets in the country, alone with such contemporaries as Louise Bogan, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elinor Wylie, published her first books of poetry "Songs of Unrest" in 1923. Under her maiden name of Bernice Kenyon, she published two other volumes, "Meridian" in 1933, and "Night Sky" in 1950, and at her death was seeking a publisher for her fourth volume just completed, "Mortal Music." The clarity of her vision and gracious eloquence about the mystery and beauty of the world filled each of her poems and were praised for their quiet voice and piercing insight.
"Immortality...is a lifeless thing, A thing of stars. No god has ever worn it-only the sand, The unliving rock, the immutable element, Rising to shape itself at your desire; Falling again in the same relentless forms: Crystals of salt of snow, or patters of fire, Changeless forever."
Born Sept. 21, 1897 in Newton, Mass., Bernice Kenyon Gilkyson grew up on Long Island at Oakside, her grandfather's estate. She attended the Knox School and then Wellesley College, where she became known for her poems and plays. Graduating in 1920 Phi Betta Kappa, she accepted an offer by editor Robert Bridges at Scribner's Magazine to become story editor. The first woman editor in New York, she quickly moved on to become personal assist to Maxwell Perkins in the book department, working with John Hall Wheelock, and with such writers as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Marjorie Kinan Rawlings.
She married T. Walter Gilkyson, Lawyer and Scribner novelist from Philadelphia in 1927, and together they traveled to Lake Como in Northern Italy where they lived for two years. Returning to American in 1930, they traveled throughout the South, living in Southern Pines, N.C., Florida and Bermuda, before moving to New Hartford in 1935. Throughout they continued their work, publishing short stories, poems, Articles and reviewed current fiction in such journals as The Atlantic, American Mercury, Harper's, and the Yale Review, Review and others. In 1950 Mrs. Kenyon Gilkyson shared a national book award with Robert Frost for her poetry.
She also worked with Efrem Zimbalist Sr on an opera produced at the Curtis School of Music in Philadelphia entitled "Landara", writing the Libretto for the piece. Her great friendship with writers of her day, whom have now become renown, include Marjorie K. Rawlings, H.L. Mencken, the Medevialist Roger Loomis, and poets Stephen Vincent Benet and John Hall Wheelock.
The Hartford Courant
Also notable: in 1978, Bernice Kenyon Gilkyson became the first person to make a donation to the New Hartford Land Trust. She left a bequest of 20.5 acres of land located between Stub Hollow and Town Hill Road.
Pastors of the Town Hill Church
Rev Jonathan Marsh
1714 – 1794
Pastor 1739 – 1794
Rev Amasa Jerome
1775 – 1832
Pastor 1802 – 1813
Rev Cyrus Yale
1786 – 1854
Pastor 1814 – 1854
Excerpts published inThe New Hartford Tribune | Friday January 19 1900:
The first pastor of the church was the Rev Jonathan Marsh of Windsor. He was a graduate of Yale College, class of 1735, and, on finishing his theological studies, accepted the call to New Hartford where he was ordained in December 1739. Here he spent his life, and here he died in 1794, at the age of eighty years, after a faithful pastorate of 55 years. Mr Marsh was a large man, of dignified demeanor, sympathetic and charitable. He was Arminian in his theological views, and did not enter into the religious controversies of his time. The church prospered under him, and received additions from time to time, indeed its membership included nearly all the respectable adult population of the town.
The third pastor, Rev Amasa Jerome, came to New Hartford from West Stockbridge, Mass. in 1802 and remained until 1813, when he resigned the pastorate on account of failing health. Mr Jerome bought the place now known as "Esperanza," and built the house now standing, which the present owner has much altered and improved. Mr Jerome, after resigning from his New Hartford pastorate, was settled at Wadsworth, Ohio, but, owing to ill health, returned, after a short time, and ended his days in his Town Hill home where he died in 1832, leaving a widow and six children. No special seasons of revival are recorded during Mr Jerome's ministry.
The fourth and last pastor of the Town Hill church as Rev Cyrus Yale, a native of Lee, Mass, who was installed over the church in 1814, and remained its pastor until his death in 1854, with the exception of three years, from 1834 to 1837, when he was settled at Ware, Mass, resigning, according to the records of the Litchfield North Consociation, because of the difficulty in raising his salary in New Hartford, but returning on an urgent invitation and a pledge that $600, yearly should be raised for his support. Mr Yale owned the place now known as "Eaglenest," where he raised his family of nine children, the survivors of whom still keep the homestead for a summer residence. Mr Yale was greatly beloved and esteemed by his people and by his ministerial bretheren.
Read WAR UNREASONABLE 1833 and THE GODLY PASTOR 1854 by Reverend Cyrus Yale
NOTE: The second pastor of the church, Rev Edward D. Griffin served 1795 – 1801, lay resting elsewhere.
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